Vyacheslav Molotov

Vyacheslav Molotov (9 March 1890-8 November 1986) was the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union from 19 December 1930 to 6 May 1941, succeeding Alexei Rykov and preceding Joseph Stalin; from 1939 to 1945 and from 1953 to 1956, he served as Foreign Minister.

Biography
Vyacheslav Molotov was born on 9 March 1890 in Kukarka, Vyatka Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Sovetsk, Kirov Oblast, Russia). Molotov was a member of the Bolsheviks since the early 1900s, and he joined the central staff of the Pravda news publication in 1911 after meeting Joseph Stalin. In 1915, he was deported to Irkutsk in Siberia for his communist activities, only to return to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1916. Molotov took part in the Russian Revolution and became Stalin's second-in-command, becoming a Politburo member in 1926. He supported Stalin against his rivals Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin, and he became a leading member of the Stalinist core of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. From 1930 to 1941, he served as the de facto head of state of the Soviet Union, and he also served as Foreign Minister from 1939 to 1945 and from 1953 to 1956. He was involved in the 1941-1942 purges of the Red Army and with the Soviet atomic bomb project, but he fell out of favor after the end of World War II for publishing a speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill which had praised the USSR's efforts during the war. Molotov was purged from the government, but the fall of Stalin led to Molotov ultimately surviving the expected purge. Under Leonid Brezhnev, Molotov was rehabilitated, being acquitted of all of the accusations pitted against him by Stalin. He died in 1986 at the age of 96.